Eliot Spitzer's rollicking campaign rollout

A victory could put him on a path overnight to run for mayor in 2017. | AP Photo

“The investment community looks to the city comptroller to be a careful steward of the public pension system, not an activist enforcement agent,” said Kathy Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City.

On the plus side, though, Spitzer has a family fortune to draw on, an opponent who’s little known beyond his home base, and name recognition as a statewide official that was only enhanced by his prostitution scandal. And as Weiner has shown in his own race for redemption, any name ID helps, even if it stems from a bad act.

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Scandal pols: Where are they now?

Spitzer also has a rationale for what he wants to do as comptroller that directly connects to the “sheriff of Wall Street” approach that turned him into the country’s most powerful state attorney general.

Spitzer appeared to plan for this moment almost entirely on his own. He had talked with former aides about running for mayor or possibly comptroller, but talk of a Spitzer run had dropped off months ago. (Spitzer, when pressed by reporters, insisted he’d never considered a run for mayor.)

“This appears to be very carefully thought out and carefully planned, but it was done without assistance from the old team. Nobody was shocked, but nobody knew that he was doing it,” the former adviser said.

Spitzer has never relied much on polls, but there were recent ones, the adviser said, that showed him hitting into the 50s among men, particularly among minorities, a key demographic for city Democrats. Those same polls, though, show him far behind among women.

Spitzer is casting himself as a sort of anti-establishment candidate, hoping to make his case focused on the job: Just like he used his prosecutorial powers as attorney general with laws that had been dormant or overlooked, he’ll argue he can force huge changes on the city and corporations the city is invested in by leveraging the city’s $139 billion in pension funds the comptroller oversees, as well as the office’s auditing power.

But already, even the people who helped him transform the Attorney General’s Office aren’t as convinced by his argument he’d be able to do the same in the job he wants now.

“I don’t think there is as much potential in the comptroller’s office as there is in the AG’s office,” said one of Spitzer’s top aides in the attorney general’s office. “I don’t think Wall Street’s shaking in his boots that he’s going to be the comptroller.”

The scene surrounding Spitzer’s first campaign event was singularly New York. Sheinkopf’s scrum with reporters was interrupted by Spitzer’s arrival, a rapid peel-off of reporters and photographers who ran toward the former governor, surrounding him.

As sweat dripped onto his blue striped tie and through the back of his navy pinstripe suit, Spitzer answered every question asked of him, and attempted to ignore the occasional heckler who yelled in his direction.

“Prostitutes!” one man yelled. Another, a man known for calling in to the Howard Stern show, screamed over Spitzer’s voice for roughly 10 minutes: “You cheated on your family!”

“Very clever,” Spitzer replied.

A woman passed Spitzer a note. “It’s from Cindy Adams,” she said, a reference to the legendary New York Post gossip columnist. The paper’s news columnist, Andrea Peyser repeatedly shouted at him, “Where’s Silda? Where’s Silda? But where is she?”

There were few hecklers, and several people told him he deserved a second chance.

Spitzer expressed a desire to get past the prostitution scandal as the campaign continues.

“I think there’s a natural evolution and arc to the conversation, and hopefully we’ll get there at some point soon. But it’s not for me to rush it or push it faster than others want to,” he said.

But there were also relatively few people approaching Spitzer to sign his petitions.

For his part, Weiner had little interest in discussing Spitzer with reporters who, for the most part, turned up to talk to him about the former governor.

“I’m not paying a great deal of attention to the ins and outs of other races,” Weiner said in response to a POLITICO question about whether he was caught off guard by the Spitzer campaign. “I think everyone was surprised. But it hasn’t changed my life at all.”